Cool tool for 4pi photography

A new app that I’m playing around with on my iphone is Bubbli (bubb.li) a tool for making and sharing dynamic spherical photos called bubbles. Imagine you are standing inside a bubble looking at an image that is covering the interior surface so you can look around and see the view (and hear the sounds) that surrounded you when you took the picture. Click here or on the image below to see and hear an example — this is an image taken with the Bubbli app on my iphone on my morning walk yesterday.

Taking a picture is kind of like painting the inside of an imaginary sphere with your iphone. Imagine that spray paint is coming out of the iphone camera aperture and you are moving the iphone to completely paint the inside of the sphere. The Bubbli app has good instructional videos and helps you to make this task easy. The example image below took me 30 seconds or so to capture. Once the image is captured. the app processes it into a draft of sorts, then uploads it to be fully processed into the spherical image — that does take a while: a few minutes for my example below. Each image gets its own url and there are options built into the app for sharing via popular social networks or by email. All a recipient needs to view an image is a browser … they don’t need any special software or downloads. You view your library of images on your phone. This is kind of like your phone display being a window into a snapshot of the past — you navigate by physically moving your phone around to look up, down, and otherwise explore the image. You can pull up a map to see where the image was taken and you can put images together into an album.